SkanApp User Guide

The SkanApp is a high speed1 document scanning application for Android smartphones.

With a single press of a button, the app can crop, split, enhance, straighten (de-skew) scanned pages,
generate multipage, searchable PDF file in Color, Grayscale or B/W mode, attach voicemail and sent it to
multiple Cloud destinations.

The app can be used in a stationary (i.e. when the smartphone is placed in the Skanstick or similar
device) or in a hand-held mode.

This guide provides the information you need to get started using all of the SkanApp features. If you
need more help, email support at [email protected].

Hand-Held Mode
1. If necessary, rotate the screen by tapping the Rotation button: single tap – 90 degrees counter
clockwise or long tap – either direction.
2. Adjust the cropping frame and select a single or double page mode.
3. Take pictures/scans by either:
• Tapping the on-screen button with the camera icon.
• Pressing the Volume Up button.

The counter of scanned pages will appear at the bottom of the Camera button.

4. Optionally, record the voicemail by either:

• Tapping the on-screen button with the microphone icon.
• Pressing the Volume Down button.
Press/tap the button again to stop recording and listen to the playback.

When the voicemail recording is available, the tape icon is shown at the bottom of the

Microphone button. To play back again or delete the voicemail, tap the microphone icon ( )
to show the popup dialog box with these options

To overwrite the recording, press the Volume Down button to start a new recording.

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 5. If necessary, choose/change destinations.
• To turn on/off, tap the destination icon (smartphone, SD card, email, computer or
Google Drive) Notice the smartphone and SD card icons are active.
• To quickly enable/disable options, long tap the destination icon to open Smartphone
(shown below as an example), SD Card, Email, Computer or Google Drive Settings
(short versions) to select or add a folder, whether to include the voicemail, convert to
PDF and set the PDF keywords.

6. Save/send the scanned pages by either:

• Tapping the on-screen button with the Cloud icon.
• Double-pressing the Volume Up button.

NOTE: The destination folder and its parent folders will be created automatically, if they
don’t exist.

Make your smartphone work for you

When done scanning, tap the phone’s Home button to suspend/pause the SkanApp and let its
background process finish potentially long running tasks, such as OCR (on average, it takes 20 minutes
for Samsung Galaxy S7 to OCR 100 pages). You can turn off the screen at this time. Listen for the double
beep, indicating the completion of the tasks, reactivate the SkanApp to verify the counter on the Cloud
button is gone (unless Google Drive was one of the selected destinations - it only works when the app is
visible) and then close the app by clicking the phone’s Back button to conserve the battery.

TIP: If generation of the PDF files is not urgent, and you want to conserve the battery while away from
the charging station, you can close the app immediately after scanning. The background tasks will
restart automatically the next time you launch the SkanApp.

Stationary Mode
1. Place the smartphone in the Skanstick or similar device.

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 2. Rotate the screen, if necessary, as described in step 1 of the Hand-Held Mode section.
3. Adjust the cropping frame and select the single or double page mode.
4. Tap within the cropping frame to set focus.
5. Choose the scanning mode:
• Augmented Reality (AR) mode
• Wired Remote Control
• Bluetooth Remote Control
• Manual, as described in the Hand-Held mode section.
6. Based on the choice in step 5, follow the steps in the corresponding section below.

AR Mode
1. Tap the AR mode toggle button. When active, the button is underlined. Notice that the three
buttons on its right (Camera, Microphone and Cloud) changed their appearances (border) and
state. In this state, they function as AR buttons.

NOTE: By default, the AR mode button is not visible. Set checkbox Show AR Mode button on the
Smartphone Settings dialog

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 2. Drag the AR buttons one-by-one outside of the cropping frame.

NOTE: The AR buttons work best when placed over dark/black surface. If your desktop is not
dark, place the black pouch that came with the Skanstick or a piece of black paper/ fabric in the
projection area of the AR buttons.

3. Tap in the middle of the cropping frame to set focus.

4. Use a long tap to activate each AR button, and a single tap to de-activate it. When activated, the
button is underlined. In that state, any changes in the image within the boundary of the button
will be interpreted by the app as tapping.
5. Take picture/scan by momentarily moving your finger in the area of the Camera button. Based
on your page mode selection, the counter at the bottom of the button will be incremented by 1
or 2.
6. To record voice notes, move your finger underneath the Microphone AR button and hold it
there while recording. Move the finger away to stop recording and listen to the playback.
Repeat, if necessary, to overwrite the previous recording.

NOTE: To playback again or delete the recording, tap the button to de-activate it, and then long
tap it again as if you were to activate it. Press the Playback or Delete button in the popup dialog
box.
7. Move your finger within the area of the activated Cloud button to save/send the files to the
currently active destinations. Observe the counter of the scanned pages on the Camera button
disappear, and the counter of the destination packages, located above the Cloud button is
incremented by the number of active destinations.

NOTE: If the uploading/sending fails, the alert icon (triangle) will be shown on left of the bottom
toolbar. Tap the icon to view the error message. To retry, set the checkbox(s) of the failed
transmission(s) and press the OK button. For failed emails, an Email Settings dialog box (short
version) will be shown to let you change parameters, such as password, destination emails or
even the sending email account.

Wired Remote Control

1. Plug the audio cable that came with the Skanstick or any headphone with a media button (i.e.
those that came with your smartphone), into the audio port. Notice that the AR Mode button is
replaced with the headset icon (Wired Remote Control button), and the Camera, Microphone,
Cloud buttons are activated. The icons are underlined.
The Wired Remote Control toggle button has two states – single (default) or multi-mode. To
activate the multi button, tap the Wired Remote Control button.
2. Single Button Mode
a. Take picture/scan - Press the button on the cable or the Pause button on the
headphones.
b. Voice notes recording - Triple press the button to start recording. Single press to stop it
and listen to the playback. Repeat if necessary to overwrite the recording.

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 c. Save/send files - Double press the button.
3. Multi Button Mode
a. Take picture/scan - Press the Pause button.
b. Voice notes recording – Press the Volume Down button to start recording. Press it again
to stop it and listen to the playback.
c. Save/send files - Press the Volume Up button.

Bluetooth Remote Control

1. Enable Bluetooth on your smartphone and pair the Bluetooth Remote Shutter or any Bluetooth
selfie stick.
2. To take picture/scan - Press the button on the Bluetooth Remote Shutter.
3. To record voice notes - Triple press the button to start recording. Single press to stop it and
listen to the playback. Repeat if necessary to overwrite the recording.
4. To save/send files - Double press the button.

OCR, Searchable PDF Files

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) makes it
possible to generate searchable PDF files. For each
language, the OCR requires an additional file with
training data. When the app is installed, the
background process begins downloading the file
for the default language, English.

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Enable OCR
1. Tap the settings button (the gear icon) and select the PDF option.
2. Select the OCR checkbox.
3. Tap the LANGUAGES toggle button, to expand the current list of installed OCR languages. Select
the desired language. The name of the selected language(s) will appear in the textbox on the
right of the LANGUAGES button. If you need to add another language, simply tap in that textbox
and select the language from the list. The new selection will replace the current value in the
textbox and will add the language to the list of available languages.
4. If your documents contain more than one language, you can select the checkboxes of the
required languages. Please be aware that having multiple languages active will make the OCR
process run longer and is not as reliable as using one language for the document.

5. If you get OCR timeout error messages (triangle icon on the bottom toolbar) for pages with text,
increase the default value of 300 sec. The time it takes to OCR a page depends on the phone’s
processor speed and type and quality of the image.

NOTE: You can view what pages failed OCR by tapping the error (triangle) icon. The page
numbers and files are shown to let you know that some pages have no searchable text.

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 Currently, you can’t rerun the OCR on individual pages. However, you can export the images

from the PDF file by tapping the Import/Export button ( ) and selecting the Re-use option.
After you increase the OCR timeout value, tap the Cloud button to generate and save a new PDF
file.

What affects the quality and speed of the OCR?

• Image type – simple images without graphics produce faster and better results.
• Lighting – sufficient lighting makes better images and consequently improves the quality of the
OCR. Using a flash, even in daylight, can also improve the quality of OCR.
• Text size – too large or too small text may remain undetected. As the image/text is scaled
according to the current PDF page size (set in PDF settings), select the appropriate size of the
document to approximately match the cropping frame, or create and add a new document size,
described in the NOTE section below. The selected size will also affect the printout (i.e. a
business card scanned with the cropping frame close to its borders and the Letter/A4 page size
selection, would be scaled up to fill the page).

NOTE: To create a custom document size (i.e. a business card), enter the desired name, width
and height (either in inches or millimeters), and press the button with the plus sign.

PDF Keywords
PDF specifications contain a concept of keywords. The keywords can be searched for and viewed with
the help of Adobe Acrobat or another third-party tool. Using keywords to organize documents is more
flexible than simply placing documents in a folder and it makes it easier to find documents that don’t fit
in a single category. Another advantage is the ability to create keywords in multiple languages for each
PDF file, and therefore the documents could be organized and discovered in multiple ways regardless of
the languages used (and OCR’ed) in the document.

The SkanApp shows the embedded keywords below the file name. The files are located in public2 folder
Pictures/SkanAppStorage or its subfolders. To view, email or delete the files, long tap the smartphone
destination icon and press the Browse button.

NOTE: Searching by the keywords, file names and full text (OCR) will be implemented in near future.

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Email Settings
If you chose the Allowed to access the Accounts option when the SkanApp was launched, most of the
required fields will be filled. Enter the password for the selected email account and tap the OK button.

NOTE: If you chose a Gmail account and have enabled the 2-step verification recommended by Google,
you will need to disable it and also enable the Allow less secure apps option on the Gmail Account Web
page. Although it is possible to change the SkanApp to work with those options enabled, the process of
setting it up is cumbersome. Search for the Two step verification for Outlook to learn how to do this.
Please let us know if you’d like us to modify the SkanApp to work with the 2-step verification option
enabled.

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Smartphone Settings
Most of the settings in the Smartphone Settings dialog box are self-explanatory. The rest are explained
below.

Delete JPEG Files on PDF Conversion

Even when the Convert to PDF option is selected, saving the original JPEG files have certain benefits.
Not only could you re-generate PDF files with different parameters, as described in the Enable OCR’s
NOTE section, you can also combine and reorder pages of different documents.

TIP: Although you can keep both the JPEG and PDF files on your smartphone, to preserve disk space,
enable the Delete JPEG Files option and use one of the Clouds (Dropbox or Google Drive) to store the
original JPEGs. Black and white PDF files are smaller than the JPEG files used to generate them by an
order of magnitude.

Deskew/Straighten
When enabled, the scanned documents will be rotated if the skew angle is within 20 degrees. For non-
document scans (photos, etc.), disable that option to prevent unpredictably rotated pictures.

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Scan and Send
When enabled, every scan will be saved/sent automatically with any available voicemail file. The

Capture button (camera icon) has a different look ( ) (a smaller version of the Cloud button in its
upper right corner) to indicate that status.

Show Custom White Balance

When enabled, the Custom White Balance button ( ) will be shown on the bottom toolbar. When/if
the camera’s built-in white balance algorithm fails and produces images with a tint/color cast you can
correct the balance with a single tap of that button. It works similarly to the white or gray card used by
professional photographers with high-end DSLR cameras to set white balance. Use one of the three
methods below:

• Tap the Custom White Balance toggle button. The background color of the page will be used as
a white color to correct the white balance of the following pictures until the button is turned off
by tapping it again. This is the easiest way to correct the white balance.
• Place a white sheet of paper over the document so that the cropping frame is completely within
the boundaries of that sheet. Tap the Custom White Balance button.
• Instead of the white sheet in step 2, place a professional white card within the cropping frame
and tap the button.

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Language
You can change any user interface text and remove or add new languages.

• To change any text, find and correct the corresponding line in the localized file (english.txt,
german.txt, french.txt or russian.txt). They are located in the Pictures/SkanAppConfig folder.

Double Click Time (sec)

The Double Click Time (sec) option determines how fast you need to press the physical button (whether
on the phone, Bluetooth Remote Shutter or Wired Remote Control) to produce a double or triple click
effect. Increase this value if your double click press is interpreted by the SkanApp as two individual
clicks.

How to view, delete or email saved files on the smartphone

Long press on the smartphone destination icon on the right and press the Browse button.

Alternatively, tap the Browse button on the Smartphone Settings dialog.

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1
The 250+ pages in 10 minutes scanning speed can be easily achieved in Stationary (Double Page) mode.
The post-processing time to complete background tasks, such as OCR and sending/uploading files,
depends on several factors (i.e. the processor speed, complexity of the image, etc.…) and is not
included.
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Public folders (and your files) are not deleted if/when the SkanApp is uninstalled.

Copyright © 2017, 2018 GO2GET Inc.

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